[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I don’t really know enough about flash to help you on that issue. Hopefully someone else has a good answer.

When I referred to and edge, I was referring to a style of lighting, basically a rim light, to create a highlight on the person’s shoulders and arms so that you don’t end up with a head floating in space. In the case of the iPhone video, it appears that the guy’s shirt is a dark gray and they aren’t using a rim light to separate him from the background. Instead the key light brings the tone of the shirt up a bit so we can see his head is attached to a body.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

It looks like they shot footage at night, driving down the road so they got a lot of flared highlights from passing cars and streetlights. My guess is that they dropped this in as a layer above the singer and used a blending mode like Screen or Add.

Here it is important to crush the black levels on the glare footage. Probably the best approach is to shoot with a relatively broad range in the camera but then push the contrast up in AE. You can also add whatever color correction you need at this point. By pushing up the contrast, the singer is not obscured by a lot of random image noise, but the lights flare out and blow out some areas.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

The Apple video was almost certainly shot in HD, but that doesn’t really matter here.

I’m not sure if Apple is providing the video in different codecs, but mostly likely the one you saw was in the h.264 codec which can be highly compressed and still look pretty good.

But I suspect the reason why it streams so fast is the simple fact that there isn’t a lot of data in the image. If you have a guy dressed in black on a black screen and all you can see is his face plus and edge to define the outline of his body, then there is a lot less information that has to be stored. Everything that is black can be compressed to a very small size. There may have been a conscious choice by Apple and their advertising agency to do this specifically so the videos would be fast to download.

You can see the same sort of thing by creating two Jpeg images, one with a lot of detail; trees, faces, whatever and the other will very little detail; a simple object in a black or white field. Make the pixel dimensions the same and store them with the same quality settings. Most likely the simple image will be a good deal smaller than the complex image.

Many codecs (particularly Mpeg2 and its variants) look at how much change there is between one frame and the next and only store the data needed to construct frame 2 from frame 1. The less movement or change between frames, the less data that needs to be stored. A simple image, without a lot of movement can be compressed quite a lot. So if you are creating a video podcast and you want it to download quickly, you may want to favor a static background rather than something with a lot of movement.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Depending upon the look you are going for and how much tweaking you are inclined to do in AE, you should be able to get a decent rain effect with layers of rain. Even the rain plugin that comes with AE should work if you modify it with some blurs and what not.

One thing that struck me in your post was that you intend to shoot your practical rain effect without lighting. It seems to me that the rain will not show up unless you light it. I haven’t done this myself so I may not know what I’m talking about, but you may want to make some tests before the actual shoot.

You shouldn’t have a problem adding rain to the view out the window. With proper masking and blending layers, you should be able to achieve an acceptable result.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

HI,

I don’t know of any 3D programs that are quick and easy to learn and get usable results out of, but for someone who wants to experiment it’s hard to go wrong with Blender. (blender.org) The program is both open source and free and runs on the 3 major OSs.

It has some interface quirks that are a bit frustrating to deal with; save, for example is Crtl-W (for “write”) and there are some aspects of how you select points that really drive me nutty.

That said, it was the program I used to learn enough 3D so that I could understand Maya. The key for me was that because Maya’s learning edition watermarked anything I did and the files couldn’t be migrated to the real world version of Maya, I found it hard to get the enthusiasm to really plow into the program since I couldn’t create any “finished” work with it.

But since Blender allowed me to create finished work without taking the risk of buying a hugely expensive program that I might not be able to learn, I was able to work without feeling like it was a waste of time and money. I am strongly driven by what I think I can achieve as an end result and so I tend to learn better and do better work if I feel I am creating a usable product. Blender worked well for that, but for commercial work, I would rather work with Maya because its interface is better and it doesn’t crash so much.

I played with Lightwave many years ago and I liked it well enough, but I tend to favor Maya due to it’s highly modular structure. Like Shake, I like the idea of certain tasks and effects being stored as a node since this helps me to conceptualize what is happening in the program. But this means that Maya can also be a very difficult program to start out with.

I have played with the learning version of Cinema4D and felt that it was relatively easy to learn (although the key word here is “relatively”) The integration with AE is very appealing. That was, in fact, the reason why I was looking at it. The Maya camera can be imported to AE, but it’s not a perfect match and I have often found it frustrating to get the two programs to play nicely together.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

As mentioned above, the RAID isn’t gonna do a whole lot for speed. You might get tiny benefits from using it for your scratch disc as well as file access times. If you are doing work in HD then it may be necessary if for no other reason than to be able to see your animations play back in real time.

You can get pretty inexpensive RAID setup if you are not too concerned about losing data if a drive fails. I use a couple of Burley Port Multiplier boxes and a CalDigit eSATA controller for a JBOD and a RAID setup. These can be found at https://www.macgurus.com/

As for Nucleo Pro, obviously if you only have a single processor, it ain’t gonna help too much. With more cores plus memory, you get a really good performance boost. The nice thing is that when you send a render job to it, the background render works in “nice” mode (at least on OS-X). What this means is that if your foreground process needs the processors, the background will be nice and scale back while you are working. Yes, this slows down the background render, but it means that the system is still responsive in the foreground. And of course if you pause to get a cup of coffee, the background renders will speed up again.

Also if your work flow requires getting an animation to an editor in the next bay while you still need to continue on another animation, Nucleo Pro will let you keep working. (Yes, you could fire up the command line renderer, but this is easier.) If you tend to build the animations and then render over-night, then maybe Nucleo isn’t going to help you too much, but in my case it has been very helpful.

My opinion is that Nucleo Pro is the best plug-in I have bought for AE (and I have plenty of pretty good plugins.)

If you need to speed up your renders, you may want to look into adding memory. I currently have 2Gigs per core and that seems to be working pretty well for me since AE cannot access more than 3Gigs per core in a background render. I could still add more memory, but looking at the processor and memory load during renders, I don’t think it would help to go beyond 2 per core.

Hope this helps,

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

I guess the concept of deteriorating over time is based on your time scale.

Actually the Technicolor process is one of the few really stable color processes, but mainly because it uses black and white stock and stable color dyes which are chemically separated from the photo sensitive process. A properly fixed silver halide image should be stable for a good long time, usually much longer than the stock base (although modern Estar bases are fairly dimensionally stable).

My understanding is that no single strip color process is really stable since there is a trade off between the stability of the dyes used in the process and their ability to work with the color couplers and other chemicals that convert a silver halide, black and white image to the cyan, magenta or yellow layers. The early Eastman color process was bad enough, but some development formulations were better than others. Many films from the 60s and 70s have that harsh red tint from presumably because the yellow and cyan layers in the print stock were less stable than magenta.

Early Technicolor had some problems, but they quickly perfected the process and even today, prints from the 30s and 40s can be just as brilliant and clear as when they were first projected. The real problem in preserving these films is the differential shrinkage of the original black and white records.

It makes sense to investigate what is actually happening in these film stocks if you are going to duplicate the look. You might be able to find some technical papers that discuss chemical breakdowns in different color layers. But since these problems were at their worst in the 60s and 70s, you might have more luck digging around a good library than on the internet.

Then again, you could just start tweaking the gammas of each of the RGB levels until you get a look that works.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Here’s my experience.

I’m doing a project which needs versions created for something like 27 different languages. Most of the animations are in AE, but some are in Maya and Shake. Recently I did the Japanese and Arabic graphics.

Japanese was pretty easy. I had a PDF file from the translator where I could simply copy and paste characters. Since I had the Japanese fonts in my computer, they pasted right in and I did a visual check to make sure the characters were right. Of course the translator will look at them later to make sure I haven’t missed something.

Anyway, this is how we did the Chinese graphics some time ago and that went well.

Arabic, on the other hand did not go so smoothly. I was told that I could simply use Ariel and the Arabic from the PDF would paste in just fine. But, at least to my eye, the characters did not look right. I may have needed to look for an Arabic version of the Ariel font, but that had not occurred to me at the time.

What I ended up doing was zooming into the text on the PDF file, doing a screen capture of the image of the text, placing that into an Illustrator file and using the trace feature to create outlines of the text. I saved these and imported them as artwork into AE and Maya and Photoshop as needed. Of course I cannot edit the text without going back and redoing the whole screen grab, illustrator to vector art process, but it does get the job done.

As for Hebrew text, I have four fonts available to me in OS-X. They are Arial Hebrew, Corsiva Hebrew, New Peninim MT and Raanana. I’m not entirely sure where these came from. They may be part of the OS-X installation or may have come with the Adobe products. Anyway, I did a quick test, searching for Hebrew in Google. This comes up with some text which can be copied and pasted into AE. The result I am seeing is that the characters are running in the opposite direction (left to right) from how they run displayed on the web browser.

Not being able to read any of this, I don’t know which is correct. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who can shed some light on this issue. Wikipedia might have some helpful information. Anyway, if someone can explain how to get the characters to reverse direction, that would be quite useful.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

The center point is known as the anchor point in AE. With the layer selected, hit the “a” key to bring down it’s properties. You can modify the values as you might the postion or you can use the “Pan Behind Tool” by hitting “Y” and drag the center point around on screen.

Lars

[Lars Bunch]

Hi,

Do you have Helvetica? Ariel is just Microsoft’s very slight modification of Helvetica. The main difference is in the terminators on the letter c, s, r and the top of the t. They end at an angle whereas Helvetica ends flat.

Lars